The Dying Sound
by Secret Staircase
Summary: Sayaka's thoughts on the night of the Kagura.


Later, Sayaka would think back and realise it had been a long time since she'd really trusted Shigeto Haibara. Not that she'd acted accordingly. After what Souya had done, she ought to have known not to trust anyone, but she had been afraid, and Shigeto had been kind.

She'd always admired his kindness. His reserves of generosity and patience seemed to have no end. She sat in his office after Ruka was admitted, and he put aside all his work to speak to her, without a mention of being busy, though she knew he must be.

"You're worrying over nothing," he said gently. "I don't expect Ruka will need to be here long. Some young children simply grow out of it, and if she doesn't, our research has come a long way. We've made a great deal of progress in the surgical field, for example, and between you and me, I'm very excited about the new idea of music therapy."

"I had no idea you'd learned so much," Sayaka said. "And you're sure Ruka isn't seriously ill? In the garden, she seemed..."

"Not at all!" he said, smiling at her. "Of course a mother would notice any small change immediately, but Ruka's case is really very mild. She'll get better in no time, you'll see."

Sayaka tried to smile back, but her face felt stiff and strange. "I just don't know what I'll do then," she admitted. "I don't think..." She stopped, struggling with herself, and Shigeto touched her shoulder.

"It's all right," he said. "I'll take it all in confidence."

Sayaka nodded, making a conscious effort to keep her hands relaxed and not clench them tight in her lap. "I don't think I can take Ruka home again after this," she said in a low voice that shook a little. "Souya's... changed. I don't think... I'm not sure it's safe for her to be around him."

"Oh, come now," Shigeto chided gently. "Aren't you overstating a little? I've known Souya for many years, and this is nothing new for him – when we were young he was forever finding new things and becoming captivated with them for a while. He was the same with you, and I'm surprised it lasted this long – you can't be his favourite forever, you know. Now he's found something else, but once he's finished this little project, he'll be back to normal."

Sayaka stared at him. There was something in what he'd said that she didn't like, but she wanted to believe Souya might be the same again. She wanted it so badly. "Are you sure?" she said. "I've never – "

Before she could finish, someone opened the office door without knocking. Shigeto stood up quickly, ready to be stern, but it was one of the patients: a middle-aged woman in a white hospital robe with lost, longing eyes.

"I've lost it," she said in a slow voice that seemed to come from far away. "Something precious. I can't find it anywhere. Can you help me?"

Sayaka half-expected that Shigeto would push the woman out again and call for a nurse, but instead he spoke warmly, as if to a favourite child.

"Don't worry. The nurses already found it. It's in your room, waiting for you."

The woman in the hospital robe tilted her head. "They found it?"

"Go and look," Shigeto suggested. "You'll find it just where I said it would be."

"If I find it," the woman said, "I'll get better."

"That's right. You'll get better in no time."

The woman blinked her heavy-lidded eyes, tried to smile, and then shuffled out again without another word. Shigeto closed the door behind her.

"That poor woman," Sayaka said. "You were so kind to her. What was it she'd lost?"

Shigeto shrugged. "They always think they've lost something," he said dismissively. "They're externalising the sense of loss they feel about their own memories and pinning it on an object. By the time she gets to her room, she won't even remember coming in here."

"And will she get better?"

"I doubt it, not now. But let's not worry about her. I don't expect your daughter will ever get to that stage, so don't let it weigh on your thoughts." He said it in exactly the same soothing tone he'd used to tell the patient she'd get better, and...

And he'd been _lying_ then.

Sayaka sat up straighter. Was he lying now? She looked into his amiable, familiar face, and felt suddenly she didn't know him at all – had never known him. Was he just telling her comforting lies so she wouldn't make a fuss?

_What do you want with me?_ Sayaka thought, staring into the face of a stranger she'd known for years. _What do you want with Ruka?_

"Listen," Shigeto was saying, "if you don't want to go home tonight, we've plenty of room here. You can be close to Ruka. And if you like, I'll have a word with Souya – I won't tell him you said anything, don't worry. After all, he's my oldest friend, and if you think he's not well, I'd like to know for sure."

He smiled at her again, that open, fatherly smile that made people trust him and open up to him. She'd seen him draw out crying children and make them grin back. His patients were losing everything they had, but he could make them feel safe. He made her feel the same.

And was he lying? Could he be? Sayaka didn't think so – she didn't _want_ to think so, because if she couldn't trust Shigeto, there would be nobody to turn to, nobody at all.

She took him up on his offer and stayed in the hospital whenever she could. When she went home in between, Souya was rarely there, and if he had noticed her absence, he showed no sign. He wore his ceremonial robes all the time now; the sleeves had gathered a light fluff of sawdust, and the robes were dark where he had been kneeling. She couldn't tell whether Shigeto had spoken to Souya or not – neither mentioned it, and Souya paid Sayaka no more attention than a tree in the garden.

The day of the lunar eclipse came. Sayaka had been waiting for it, the way other people awaited a thunderstorm during a hot, humid summer. She could hear the weight of the island air. At night, it sang in her head, a drilling whine the colour of old matting, yellow-grey and heavy, heavy.

She didn't see Ruka that day; she had to invite some of the islanders to the Yomotsuki house, according to tradition. Souya was supposed to be there as well, of course, as the head of the Yomotsuki family, but nobody commented on his absence, and Sayaka supposed her unusual silence was attributed to anxiety over her daughter.

The islanders did not take advantage of her hospitality for too long, but thanked her graciously for the meal and then left for the dais. Souya's apprentice went with them to hand out some of the masks he'd made for the other islanders. Sayaka was annoyed with herself for her unwelcoming behaviour, but she was glad they were gone all the same. She wanted to be alone in her empty house, listening to the thrum of the air.

She wondered where Souya was. She had stood outside his workshop, listening, but there had been no sound from within. Perhaps he had been in the caves that lay beneath – Sayaka knew they were there, though she was forbidden from entering, since she was not a Yomotsuki by birth or a mask-maker by training. Souya had told her about them, explaining that mask-making was a spiritual discipline as much as an artistic one, and she'd listened to him hold forth on that topic for a good while, saying nothing herself, only smiling slightly. Souya forgot sometimes, or liked to pretend he had forgotten, that she had a heritage of her own and did not need such things explained to her.

She thought of it now with a similar slight smile, but this one was sad. He had decided to believe that she knew nothing, and so he had withdrawn from her. They had grown apart, very far apart. She was beginning to think neither of them would close the distance again; she did not know whether it would even be possible.

Now she sat looking out into the courtyard, listening to the late-summer evening with its faint note of autumn, and when the drumming began from the dais nearby, it seemed to grow out of the warm night air, a natural phenomenon, like the moon rising.

And the moon had risen. It hung loose and yellow as an old woman's tooth in the sky, one edge shrinking already, perhaps, a little bit at a time.

Sayaka rose with a start. Soon they would lock the doors to the Hall, and she would miss the festival if she wasn't careful. She had to go as a representative of the Tsukimori as well as the Yomotsuki; there would be talk if she wasn't there.

_Will Souya be there?_

_Will Shigeto?_

She frowned. Of course Shigeto would be there. He'd organised the whole event. He'd prepared masks for every patient and member of staff at the hospital. He'd shown Sayaka the mask and robes he'd had made to wear himself on the night of the eclipse – yellow silk and a court hat, like the ancient ceremony-masters of the island; it had reminded Sayaka uncomfortably of Souya's recent insistence on wearing his ceremonial dress all the time, but she had been impressed by the beauty and richness of the robes. The main dancer was to be one of the hospital nurses, a sweet, dedicated girl whom Sayaka had come to know quite well, since she managed the third floor ward where Ruka was staying. Shigeto had chosen her himself, and would want to make sure she did well.

More than that, Shigeto was a Haibara, and the kagura was as much a part of the Haibara family as it was a part of the island; the three could not be separated. It was unthinkable that he should not be there.

Sayaka straightened her kimono – purple-grey with black cloud-tendrils rising up the skirt and sleeves, the traditional pattern – and picked up her mask from where it had been lying beside her. Ruka would be there. Sayaka had hoped to guide her through every stage of the ceremony's preparation, teaching her everything she knew; it wouldn't be like that, under the circumstances, but perhaps Sayaka would be able to teach her something afterwards.

When she arrived at the stage, it was already crowded with people. The masked man at the door handed her a candle, and as she edged through the crowd, seeking a space, she heard them close and bar the doors, as if they'd only been waiting for her to get there.

Some few people recognised her by the refined beauty of her clothes and the exquisite carving of her mask, and they stepped aside respectfully to make room for her, but the rest were intent on keeping their good vantage point, so Sayaka still ended up quite a way back. She scanned the crowd, seeking Shigeto's yellow silk and strange, grimacing mask, but she couldn't see him. She saw Ruka, standing near the front on the other side, a small figure in a yellow dress, and at that moment she wanted her daughter beside her so badly that tears blurred her vision. She blinked them away with determination. Afterwards, there would be time.

She saw some others she recognised – the nurses, the island people who had come to her house, one whom she thought might be Dr. Katagiri, and Misaki and Madoka, the two little girls Ruka had befriended. She was still trying to locate Shigeto when someone else caught her eye.

The man was not wearing a mask, so she knew he was neither from the island nor a guest of an islander. He was young, tall and long-limbed, and she remembered the nurses talking (in whispers, lest their gossip make its way back to the Director) about a police officer who'd come to the island looking for You Haibara.

She supposed this must be the detective. She didn't approve of him coming to see the Kagura when he didn't even know enough to borrow a mask from somewhere – it wasn't as if masks were hard to come by on Rougetsu Island. Nevertheless, as she studied his face she found she rather liked the look of him, on the whole; he had an honest aspect, and because he didn't seem to expect trust in the complacent way Shigeto did, she found herself wanting to trust him.

Sayaka had turned from the young police officer and was searching the crowd for Shigeto a third time when the far doors opened and the performers stepped out of the darkness. The crowd grew quiet at once. In spite of everything in her life that was unpleasant just now, Sayaka felt the same thrill of pleased anticipation when she saw them that she had felt on the night of every kagura in her life since the very first, when she had been only nine.

She had wanted to be a Kanade then, and had been very upset when her grandmother told her flatly that she wasn't allowed. When asked why, her grandmother had said, 'I'll show you on the night of the kagura,' which of course would be too late for Sayaka to argue if she thought the prohibition unreasonable.

So she had stood in the crowd, a well-behaved but still rather sulky nine-year-old girl, fidgeting in her best clothes, trying to work a finger underneath the stifling mask to scratch an itch on her sweaty cheek, and then the performers had come out, looking like creatures from an ancient tale. Sayaka gazed at the Kanade with pure envy as they took their positions on the stage, and then felt her grandmother's arm around her shoulder.

"Now, Sayaka, you'll understand why you can't be a Kanade. I want you to listen. All the time they're dancing, just listen."

"What am I listening for?" Sayaka asked, interested in spite of herself.

"You'll see."

So she had listened, trying to concentrate on that even as the beauty of the dance captivated her. She felt strange, strange, as if something were drawing away inside, as if she were receding from herself, as if she and the place where she stood were far apart. The moon was turning black when she noticed what her grandmother had wanted her to.

She could hear the instruments, the skirling pipe, the jangling chimes, the siren voice of the singing girl; but beneath that, silence. Now she realised that all her life she had been hearing music, so constant and unobtrusive that she had never noticed it until now, when it was gone. The void of that silence frightened her; it was like the space in the sky that the moon had disappeared into.

But even as she thought it, even as she gathered herself for true panic, the Utsuwa lifted her silent face to the moon, opened her arms like a gateway, and the sound came back all at once. For a moment it was one pure note, and then it split into a harmony so perfect that Sayaka could have wept. For that moment, everyone in the arena was together.

On the stage, the performers stood still for a short time, and then walked from the stage at some unseen signal. There was no need for applause, no pent-up emotion to release through sound and movement: the Kagura had released it all for them.

The harmony of the gathered crowd began to disintegrate into the quiet, common jumble of different tunes, and people started to take their masks off. Nobody was smiling, and yet their faces were all beautifully calm, serene as a hidden pool in deep forest, reflecting the moon. Sayaka pulled her own mask off, feeling the coolness of the air on her hot face, and turned to her grandmother, amazed.

"You heard it, didn't you?" her grandmother said, with satisfaction. "That's why you can't be one of the Kanade, Sayaka. You're a Tsukimori maiden. You hear the lunar melody. Once our clan was responsible for the most important preparations before the festival; it's different now, but not everything dies out."

Sayaka could hear those words clearly now, some twenty years later. _Not everything dies out._ Her eyes sought Ruka, the sole bearer of that heritage. Ruka was staring at the motionless performers as if transfixed. Would she hear it too, the dead silence, the absolute union, the flawless harmony? Sayaka would ask her about it afterwards.

The drumming did not noticeably change, but the Utsuwa and the little Kanade all began at once, as if someone had lifted a banner for them. Sayaka watched as the dance began, slow at first, a turning rhythm, flowing in like waves but always moving back a little further, a tide withdrawing. The crowd, already restrained, went into a deeper silence, and deeper still, swaying, lost in the dance.

Even now, Sayaka kept glancing at Ruka, trying to interpret the girl's stance and see how she was reacting to it all. Ruka stood unmoving, gazing at the dancer. She was alone now; Misaki and Madoka must have wandered off somewhere, and Sayaka couldn't see them any more.

A distant part of her mind – very distant, growing more so every time the Utsuwa swayed forward and the music climbed a little higher – noticed that the door on the other side of the stage was not barred, the way it was supposed to be. In fact, she thought it was slightly open.

Not that it mattered. Nobody would try to leave now, and nobody would enter that way – that was only for performers and ritual participants, not the public.

Sayaka let the dance carry her away for a while, lost in the Utsuwa's hypnotic turns, her tighter, faster circles, following the disappearing moon into its final bright sliver and then its darkness. She glanced at Ruka again.

Ruka was not there.

Sayaka came back to herself with a jolt. It was unwise to let that happen during the kagura – it could lead to spirit possession or Luna Sedata – but she hardly thought of that. Ruka had gone. Where was she?

She looked around anxiously, casting about for that familiar childish form. _Run off somewhere with her friends, perhaps; oh, Ruka, why couldn't you stay and watch, why couldn't you see how important this is to us?_ But she didn't really believe that Ruka would have gone to play in the middle of the festival; she had always been very sensitive to the spirit world, and Sayaka didn't think anyone could have induced her to leave of her own free will, surely not.

Something else was happening now. There was music rising, other than the music made by the Kanade, though all other melodies should have been all but silent by now. It was discordant, like a stringed instrument struck by accident and ringing with untuned notes; it was a cracking, grinding, invasive sound, something being driven in where it wouldn't fit, and the crowd was responding, though surely none of them knew it. The melody hurt her, deep inside her mind; it was red, shot through with black, a rotten sound with violent colours.

The Utsuwa's dance was wrong, too, somehow; at this point it always looked so disordered that it was difficult to be sure, but Sayaka thought there was a wildness to it that was not supposed to be there. Was somebody screaming?

Sayaka put her hands to her head, trying to temper the noise. She stepped between the swaying people, knocking some of them as she went, until she found a place to sit and lower her head and close her eyes. It felt all wrong.

The Kanade's playing ceased. Sayaka waited for it to end; she no longer expected the lovely harmony, she just wanted everything back to normal again. She waited.

It got worse.

Suddenly everybody's melody sounded like that, out of key, harsh and frantic, and there was a commotion around her, too. Looking up, she saw the performers all lying on the ground, lying there in the dead light. People were going out onto the stage. Others drifted, confused. They were broken, just like that; their spirits had gone away and come back changed.

She had to get away from this cacophony. In between the fractured jangling of people's inner melodies, threaded through it like a terrible harmony, was that red-and-black sound that reverberated and made her head swim: the sound of something that was dying, that could not stop living.

Nobody asked Sayaka whether she was all right as she stood up, letting her mask drop from her hand. Everybody had something else to concentrate on.

As she walked, dizzily, she looked for Ruka, but somehow she knew she wouldn't find her. Ruka was gone, and all that was left was that thrum of ugly noise, dying, that dying sound.


End file.
